With less than 60 days to go, Atos Origin, the Worldwide Information Technology (IT) Partner for the Olympic Games, announced successful completion of the largest technical rehearsal prior to the start of the 2010 Winter Games.

The objective of this key final IT testing phase, that was held together with the Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games (VANOC), is to confirm the operational readiness – people, technology and procedures - before starting the countdown to the Games which begin on February 12th.

The second Technical Rehearsals - a large-scale simulation based exercises involving the Olympic venues and the Technology Operations Centre (TOC) – were led by VANOC and Atos Origin. These are part of Atos Origin massive testing program and are designed to ensure that staff, technology and procedures are fully ready to respond to any situation at Games time. Six hundred scenarios were created to challenge the responses of the Technology team, the infrastructure system and its back-up capabilities.

Pre-defined technical testing scenarios were executed, detected, analyzed and rectified in real-time conditions, replicating those that could exist during competition time. The IT systems that are responsible for bringing results to a global audience in fractions of a second must all perform flawlessly and error-free. Representatives of various customers such as media participated in the test, using the Atos Origin applications as they would do during the Games.

Testing took place across all Olympic venues, both in the city and in the mountains, and involved all the sports. All the competitions were simulated from the real venues, enabling us to exercise on the Games infrastructure, and in real Games environmental conditions.

Atos Origin designs, integrates, manages and secures the multiple IT systems needed to manage the Olympic and Paralympic Games, as well as the systems that communicate the results to the world. Atos Origin holds the largest sports-related IT contract in the world. The contract with the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has provided IT services for Salt Lake City in 2002, Athens in 2004, Torino in 2006 and Beijing in 2008. Atos Origin will provide similar services for Vancouver in 2010 and London in 2012. The contract was renewed in 2009 for Sochi in 2014 and Rio de Janeiro in 2016.